Despite growing 93 percent from a year ago, Microsoft's Azure hasn't made a dent in Amazon's share of the $10 billion cloud market, according to Synergy Research. Amazon's AWS held steady at 33 percent of the worldwide market share of cloud infrastructure service providers in the first quarter, according to Synergy. And though it grew just 43 percent in the first quarter, Amazon's cloud revenue is more than the next five providers combines, Synergy estimates.

Women in the Channel is sharing an article about under-scheduling. My CMO friend in the Great Northwest has been overwhelmed with work, wedding, family and life. Being pulled in too many directions is a common problem.

End of year buzz around unified communications (UC, UCaaDS, Hostd PBX, Hosted UC) is ramping up. All part of the predictions and trend watching for 2016.

First, I have a shout out to my bud, Alex Doyle for this very nice video (commercial) for VZ UC&C. I have no idea if he is pitching the Cisco HCS platform or the Broadsoft VCE that he spent years sweating over.

I have seen stats about how after high school and after college more than 80% of people never read another book! I find that shocking. Jim Rohn used to say that only 3% had a library card - all the learning in the world for you for the price of a trip to the library. Well, now that library is right in your house - via the InterWebs.

The TCA held the second Channel Managers Best Practices forum in Vegas this week. Over 80 registered to listen to three of their peers get grilled by yours truly about the best ways to manage channel partners.

This wasn't recorded, but there are plans to hold another one which will be recorded. Pay attention to the TCA.

The new year is like a clean sheet of paper. The above Calvin & Hobbes cartoon talks about how a blanket of snow makes everything new again. January 2nd is like that as well. (No idea why you have to wait for that date to start something or change something.